


An Esteemed Few

by bangbang_dear



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 07:12:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3348230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bangbang_dear/pseuds/bangbang_dear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a deeply distressing gap intrinsic to friendships such as theirs. Shiki would tell you it's a socio-economic distance. Rhyme would tell you it's a matter of history itself. Beat ... Beat is very misled and would tell you their one-sided "bromance gone steamy" dynamic is pretty unsettling. Those scenarios might be preferable to the truth; after all, overcoming the chasm of mortality itself is ...</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Esteemed Few

            Joshua Kiryu had a grin spread across his face fit to dislocate his mandibles from his skull. And, like any other time that Joshua looked this ludicrously giddy, Neku Sakuraba wanted nothing more than to punch him square in the bullshit hole.

            An esteemed few were aware of this. But maintaining friendship with Shibuya’s Composer was a tough business. Once you breached the barriers of life itself, zip-lined across the mysterious but undeniably immense generational gap, accepted the inevitability of constant cancelled plans, relinquished all sense of personal privacy, mutated a second skin for yourself against the backhanded compliments, and threw a thinly veiled blanket of denial over past transgressions … you would think the rest would be a piece of H’s pumpkin pie. Hellish costly on your wallet, kind of rubbery and fake tasting, and … maybe that was a bad analogy, considering it had only survived on the menu for a week.

            Suffice it to say that it was _not_ a slice of pie being the Composer’s one mortal friend.

            The latest catastrophe had landed them where they were presently, some dusty corner by the windows of Ramen Don, where the light leaked in and kind of made the area too unpleasantly warm. Joshua, believe it or not, was trying his absolute best to look serious, just like a small kid who knows he’s in trouble but can’t stop cracking his baleful guise when confronted. Actually, that pretty much summarized the situation. Neku had never felt more like an angry soccer mom than in that moment, leering across the table at Joshua’s stupid smile dimples, readying himself to deliver a lecture.

            “You know you can’t do that … right?”

            When Joshua began resorting to hiding his god awful giggling behind his hand, Neku could only go on due to the intense flicker of irritation that it caused. He raised his hands as if preparing to perform a half-assed ninja move, only to bring them down on the table in a desperate attempt at emphasis.

            “You can’t go all … Composer saiyan around my friends. You can’t even go Composer minor, actually. I thought you wanted to, y’know, be treated like a normal human being when you visit, not a human plasma globe. Shiki seriously thought her Mii had gotten self-aware and—it’s not funny, asshat!”

            Neku seethed, but he waited for Joshua to gather his _composure_. He might have laughed at his own joke and cracked it, but he had literally just said their predicament wasn’t funny. Maybe another time.

            Once he had regained some tidbit of self-control, Joshua peered up at him again. Miraculously, he managed to trade his glee for a revoltingly blasé gesture. “It was a game glitch, Neku. Hound Nintendo about it. This is hardly different from when Furby started telling children to murder their parents.”

            “No, it’s really no— _what_ about Furby? ... Don’t change the subject.”

            Maybe this was an opportune moment to backtrack to the tragedy being discussed.

            For this very reason among others, Neku didn’t often invite Joshua to join in on group shenanigans. Needless to say, the others found him a little bit … _weird_. It was like a train wreck watching them all struggle to be polite to someone who used the word “egregious” as if it were the new hip lingo and … let’s not talk about the time Beat gave him a heartfelt acceptance speech after Joshua repeatedly, _deliberately_ referred to him as his “partner.”

            “Yo, man, I get it, a’ight? Backdoor’s got a patio, lawn chair, bug lamp, the whole shebang—“

            No, no, no, _no_ , Neku was trying his best to suppress that memory.

            So, sure, Joshua was annoying and eccentric, but that wasn’t quite what made him such an abrasive presence in the group. The day that the Composer had shown up at Hachiko, _finally_ , Neku realized one last and perplexing repercussion from the conclusion of the Long Game. That was, it seemed that Neku was the sole body who had even a vague idea who the hell this prissy kid was. And … you try coming up with an imaginary relationship when there are three bewildered faces staring at you, waiting for an introduction to the person who shot you down in broad daylight. That was the one time Joshua hadn’t asserted his own on-the-spot tale. Neku liked to think it had been out of consideration for whatever distance he wanted to set between them.

            It was probably just to see him squirm.

            And so, it was … unnerving, sometimes. Treating Joshua like an unlikely pal he had picked up from cram school. Holding his tongue when he had questions that would raise everyone else’s eyebrows. That also meant that about 65% of the time that Joshua opened his mouth, Neku was the only person in the room who knew what he was talking about. They found _that_ a little strange, too.

            It was just awkward for everyone involved (except that smug fartknocker in the skinny jeans). But this day had been different from the usual unspoken agreement not to invite Neku’s weird friend. This time, Joshua decided he was _bored_. This time, Joshua “accidentally” bumped into the group as they blithely escaped that sunless penitentiary called secondary school. Neku had to award him credit for effort, at least; throwing on a white button-up and an off-center tie around his neck made the run-in look much less contrived, considering the close proximity of the snobby private school they pretended his parents had bought him into. Most unfortunately of all, none of them had been rude enough to not let him tag along.

            “Nice tie,” Neku remembered deadpanning, at a loss for a more eloquent greeting. “You know the knot goes in front, right?”

            To which Joshua horrifically and flippantly replied, “It’s an aesthetic.”

            _Apparently_ , if he were proven too advanced at dressing smart, it would ruin his disguise.

            From that moment, he had hoped and prayed and mentally groveled and contemplated seeking out religious intervention so that Joshua would not do something stupid. It took him a long time to remember that Joshua _was_ a religious intervention.

            And chipmunk voice Jesus was _not_ listening.

            So very inspired to enjoy the moment as Beat had become, he and Rhyme, with some once in a lifetime nod from the Universe, had scraped together money to purchase a brand spankity new Wii console. Since the system had been so expensive itself, the only playable game they owned for it was a really lame and poorly animated apple throwing simulation which had come as a freebie with the package. Players had the pleasure of throwing apples at someone’s head, if it hadn’t been apparent already. It was not a very enthralling concept. But, somehow, Rhyme had stumbled upon a way to download photos from a local Internet connection, crop them, and upload them into a customizable option which generated the face to be berated. Few things on this planet were more appealing than flinging digital fruit into the teeth of the people you wished would fall into a deep, dark ravine from whence they would never return.

            There was also a rumored glitch in which, if you committed a great deal of time and decent aim, you could spell vulgarities composed of floating produce in the pixelated sky. But that would be less fun with a twelve-year-old present. Rhyme would probably opt to spell _actually imaginative_ things instead of randomly selected profanities.

            Neku never thought he would be mentally commending Joshua on his good behavior. And he had thought mostly correct, because it didn’t last long. Regardless, the Composer had spent the majority of the evening giving helpful pointers such as, “That would have hit the mark if your arm were more proportionate to the rest of you,” and, “Spot-on for a sixteenth try!” In fact, Joshua seemed entirely content to present himself as a _regular_ snotface rather than a potentially inhuman one … that is, until he started _losing_. At the beginning of the game, the group seemed to be equivalently horrendous at apple catapulting. But as they progressed through the learning curve into eventual one-hour seniority, it seemed as though everyone was improving except for the most powerful being in Shibuya.

            Joshua didn’t like losing. He resorted to the only method of recovery available. He cheated.

            They had been assailing the grimacing face of that one really old fish from Spongebob that hates chocolate when Joshua’s limited moral compass imploded. He should have seen it coming. He should have taken one look at Joshua following Shiki with his eyes, bearing the sort of grin political cartoonists draw on rich bastards lounging atop the stolen tax money and livelihoods of the poor, and known harmony was at a dead end. Shiki, innocent Shiki, chatty Shiki, vaguely annoying Shiki, didn’t stand a chance against the trump cards of all trump cards: blatant dishonesty and superhuman abilities.

            Shiki, poor, oblivious Shiki, swung back her arm, preparing to launch her metaphorical self into apple throwing stardom. Shiki, unsuspecting Shiki, let it fly. Shiki, easily frightened Shiki … may have shrieked like an alarmed Pig Noise when the apple performed a sudden halt, a swift 360, and came hurtling back into the screen, screeching the songs of dying sirens, fooling almost all of the party into briefly believing that it would pummel _their_ faces into gory pulp matter. Some people witness their lives flash before their eyes in this situation. Neku was not some people, and he envisioned that goddamn creepy fish they were previously pounding, screaming for the last time, “WHAT DID HE SAY?”

            Rather than evolve into a nuclear explosive and eradicate human existence as we know it, the apple performed a pitifully anticlimactic _poink!_ on the screen and dropped out of sight. They stared. At the television; at each other; at their limbs, to confirm their corporeal tangibility. Several seconds passed before Shiki, traumatized Shiki, whispered to the air,

            “I think—I think it just tried to make me into apple sauce.”

            “Are you sure you didn’t just throw it _backwards_?”

            That had been Joshua. And that had been the dawning moment in which Neku craned his head ever so slowly in his direction. Somehow, the decidedly confounded expression artfully poised on his face said it all. The less guilty he looked, the _more_ guilty he had to be. Catching onto the stare searing, burning, cauterizing itself in the side of his face, Joshua met his eyes. He batted his stupid effeminate lashes and lifted his stupid girly hand and wiggled his stupid—stupid fingers. Neku hadn’t possessed a fully functioning thought train to brainstorm more colorful words in the moment.

            He just wanted to _slug_ the guy.

            “Change the subject? _Neku_ , you’re the one who looks like you’re stuck in a lengthy anecdote.”

            Neku tried not to carry over his temper into this current moment sitting in front of the object of his ire. It didn’t take a genius to establish that outright anger had little productive effect on the cheater from Hell. He couldn’t help internally scathing at the aura of indifference that surrounded him, as if he were entirely, delusively convinced he had done nothing wrong. With that kind of unfounded confidence, he probably copied and pasted image links to people without first double checking that it was the correct picture instead of something else completely. He probably possessed zero anxiety as to whether, without proper diligence, that link would magically convert itself into something unspeakably offensive. Arrogant shit. Who does that? Who lives like that?

            Meanwhile, Joshua had leaned forward as if looking more closely at Neku would explain his heated silence.  Propping his chin into his hands, he emitted something of a devastated sigh. “Neku, it’s not polite to wait until the kitchen _closes_ to make an order.”

            The insinuation alone snapped Neku out of his broiling stupor. “I’m not buying you ramen,” he snapped and drove directly back into the matter at hand. Even if Joshua looked more than a little peeved by the lack of shoyu in front of him. “You used your Composer whatever for the dumbest reason. Don’t you know how to cheat like a _normal_ person? You could have taken the batteries out of her remote. You didn’t have to go and—turn the Wii into an existential revolt.”

            “Existential is a pretty word, Neku, but I don’t think you use it correctly.”

            “Shut up.” Neku dropped his face into his hands. Maybe he should switch gears on this one. “You have a really frail ego if you couldn’t stand to let a bunch of kids beat you at _apple throwing_.”

            The pinnacle of difficulty, Joshua didn’t so much as nibble at such obvious bait. “Cute. Listen, I’m going to order some noodles now. It’s really unfair of you to starve me like this, you know.”

            Unfair … to starve a dead person? He almost fell into the ploy of protesting that point, but he deemed it unworthy of the emotional strain. Peeking lackadaisically overtop his fingers, he watched Joshua scanning the vicinity for any trace of a staff member. Ken Doi had, apparently, given up on anticipating their order. If they weren’t such loyal regulars, and if they weren’t frequently coerced into acting as the shop’s number one guinea pigs, he was more than positive they would have been escorted out by now. As it were, the Composer chewed childishly at the inside of his cheek, finding the Ramen Guy engrossed in a task outrageously not involving him.

            “…What? You’re not going to imprint him to bring you food?” Neku couldn’t help half-heartedly jesting.

            “Should I?” Joshua asked, and it took several seconds for Neku to convince himself that he was not joking. It was such a _ridiculously lazy_ thing to do that he could scarcely believe an all-powerful _anything_ would go for it. Un-fucking-believable.

            Sensing that Joshua’s vacant stare indicated the worst, he all but lunged across the table to slap his shoulder … with his knuckles. The disgruntled squeak that the action warranted _almost_ made up for the perpetual migraine that was Joshua’s company. “Hey. Weenus Christ. Stop … stop doing that. I’m literally looking right at you.”

            “If I didn’t know better, I would think you’re looking right _through_ me, Neku.” And if it were possible to modify the temperature of a room through the application of sarcasm alone, Joshua had unlocked the secret. “Was paralyzing me from the shoulder down a necessity in your presentation?”

            Neku slumped back into his seat, defeated in some microcosmic manner. Did Joshua … _actually_ experience remorse, or had Neku been _imagining_ that he had looked guilty that one time at Hachiko? When Ken Doi, sporting the deeply troubled look of someone who had just woken up on a stranger’s couch with half his head shaved and painted like a pineapple, dazedly delivered a steaming bowl of noodles under Joshua’s nose, Neku found himself only staring—fazed on some cellular level that was slyly respiring an unprecedented toxicity of _done_ into his blood stream. His heart beat itself seemed to be grounding out an enervated yet wholly vicious staccato that his aural nerves translated roughly into: “fuck this.”

            At this point, mid-slurp, a sliver of concern finally crept into Joshua’s mask of a face. “I’m not going to _steal_ , Neku. Despite what you may think, my line of work does include a formidable compen—“

            “You can’t function without it.”

            The words seemed to have barreled through his teeth of their own accord, as if his stomach had grown so sickened with his asshole friend’s behavior that it had charged up an accusation arsenal in his trachea. He didn’t overlook the soft clack of a momentarily fumbled chopstick. Maybe someone else would have chalked it down to clumsy fingers. You know, someone smart enough to not befriend callous, trigger happy, man cleavage showing jerkwads.

            Joshua was able to recover his grace, but there was no denying the stale, sardonic downturn his lips had endured. “Without ramen? Dead as I may be, _yes_ , eating is still essential to basic cognitive funct—“

            “Yeah, and you can poop, too, I get it. Good for you. I meant your—brain control or whatever else you do. You can’t go without it.”

            He didn’t think that would get him anywhere. He really, really didn’t. But, sometimes—

            Watching the Composer inelegantly stuff his face full of noodles and leer at him in falsely casual reprise was perhaps one of the highlights of Neku’s entire life. Suddenly, he was smiling. Suddenly, he wanted to laugh and climb on the table and announce to the galaxy that he had Joshua Kiryu’s dainty, probably moisturized arm proverbially twisted. He settled for euphorically poking the dragon.

            “ _Josh_ , you’re so shitty at being human,” he gushed in a hysterical breath, “there are _portable toilets_ that shit better with people.”

            “Potty humor, Neku?”

            “Yeah, you get it, right? _Shit_ well with people.”

            “Your mastery in discourteous discourse astounds me.”

            “I bet you can’t even wait for the lights to turn in the Scramble.”

            “Cute.”

            “I bet you can’t even catch a bus without turning back time.”

            “Hilarious.”

            “I bet you can’t even _bake a cake_.”

            When Josh found that allegation least amusing of all, Neku, high on the dopamine release of victory, leaned forward conspiratorially. “ _Josh_ ,” he whispered with barely contained elation, “let’s _bake a cake_.”

            The Composer eyed him almost warily. “Is that innuendo? Innuendo is my business.”

            There wasn’t room in Neku’s rapidly swelling chest to recoil in distaste. “No. We’re going to bake a cake. By the book. Old fashioned. No tricks.” Joshua had actually begun to lean away at this point, for once disturbed by someone else’s borderline sadistic delight. “Eat your noodles, Kiryu. You’re gonna learn some shit today.”

            And that was how, after leaving Ken Doi a very generous tip to rectify the brazen brainwashing, they found themselves milling about a 100 yen store in search of the land’s most favorable cake mix. Er, Shibuya’s most favorable cake mix. Well … that street’s most favorable, anyway.

            The victimized party in this situation, Joshua was quick to voice his discontentment with Neku’s idea of culinary expertise. “Box mixes? You said no tricks.”

            “Tons of people use box mixes, Josh,” Neku dismissed. “It’s not a trick, it’s this thing called modern innovation. Dunno if you noticed, but we don’t have to milk our own cows anymore. What was yours named, again?”

            This earned a disdainful snort and some degree of compliance. Joshua’s index finger had a life of its own, twirling his most prominent hair squiggle in circles as he resigned himself to surveying their choices. Valentine sprinkle? Gag him. Chocolate soufflé? Yeck. Devil’s food cake? Mildly amusing in context, but no. “… I want the rainbow one.”

            Neku stared at the visually ghastly number he should have known Joshua would gravitate towards by default. “Are you … serious?”

            “Why not?” There was a level of severity in his voice that both amused and concerned Neku. “Rainbow tastes like friendship and happiness.”

            “I—no, Josh. It tastes like … vanilla. It’s just food coloring.”

           “It tastes like vanilla if you don’t have enough _Imagination_. That shouldn’t be any trouble for us, should it?” A sickeningly endearing smile. When that didn’t seem to sway his headphoned partner in crème brûlée crime, he decided to give his face muscles a rest. “ _Rain_ bow or _no_ go, partner.”

            Neku knew when to pick his battles. They left the store with rainbow pony cake mix and battered egos all around.

            The Sakuraba household didn’t top any lists in terms of luxury—but it did pose a considerable presence where comfort was concerned. It was apparent that Neku’s parental figure took a liking to low-intensity lighting and strategically placed lamps; the resulting atmosphere was of the hypnotic caliber that made guests want to fall into deep slumber upon traversing the threshold. Not to mention the constant floral aroma wafting about from every direction at once, despite the lack of perceivable air freshening outlets. If it weren’t for the faint scent of spray paint and marker ink drifting from an ever-closed door down the hall, Joshua would have not believed Neku the first time he (reluctantly) introduced the place to him as his own abode.

            Not to say that their progress in normalizing their friendship wasn’t excruciatingly slow. Not quite ready to have his undertaker chatting up his mom, Neku had understandably only extended invitations when her absence could be assured. This occasion was no different.

            As was customary, they peeked their heads into the cozy three bedroom apartment, looked left, looked right, nudged the house cat from sliding out into the urban jungle. After some verbal affirmation from Neku, the coast was deemed clear, and they marched their odd, awkward, highly unlikely amity into the kitchen to “learn some shit today.” Naturally, their misadventure began with a scavenger hunt through miserably disorganized cabinets and a fridge that hadn’t seen Clorox for longer than Neku had seen his bedroom floor.

            One egg? Check. One third cup of milk? Accounted for. Seven medium sized mixing bowls for individual coloring? Well … they would just have to rewash the same one after mixing each color. One round baking pan? A square one would have to do. One can of butter-flavored cooking spray to prevent stick-age, and … bingo! All set for optimal Composer humiliation.

            With this spread set in order, Neku thrust the box of powdered mix into Joshua’s crossly folded hands. “All right, gaylord, pop it open.”

            Accepting Neku’s language as sincerest flattery, Joshua skimmed his eyes over the brain-numbingly fundamental instructions scribed on back of the box. “Neku,” he sighed in the fakest of fake dismay, “not to criticize your sound logic, but this isn’t the most challenging task you could have invented.”

            “You want a blindfold?”

            Joshua ripped open the box without further complaint.

            Convincing himself that a celestial being _should_ be able to manage himself without supervision for a moment, Neku made it his mission to eliminate the uncomfortable silence pervading their work station. There was a nifty device nestled into a corner of the counter space for this very necessity, and in a rare moment of need, the music player he wore nearest to his heart would have to be removed and plugged in for the sake of salvaging whatever droll mood had settled in around them. It went without saying that, with the Composer within earshot, he would need to be ineffably cautious as to his musical selections. Nothing that he held too dear could be put on display for Joshua to openly mock. And nothing too … embarrassing could be played, in full expectation that it would be added to the immortal list of “things to never let Neku live down.”

            This was a very unfortunate day, because Neku had inconveniently neglected to pause the track he had earlier been enjoying before powering down the device. Given that, the speakers instantaneously resumed that mortifying melody with unspeakable gusto. His stomach dropped clear through the tiled floor. There was no taking it back; his nerves were much too stricken with a harrowing chagrin that promised decades of retrospective shame to motivate his muscles into silencing the source of such a damaging calamity. No, not before it was too—

            “ _—so it’s gonna be forever! Or it’s gonna go down in flames!”_

Overcome with adrenaline and a melodramatic fight or flight response, Neku began desperately seeking out the power button, the location of which, in his departure from all rational thought, his brain had courteously dumped from his working memory like a bag of cheap, questionable food pellets over the fence of the otter exhibit at the zoo. No, no, no, no, no, Taylor Swift, shut your _brilliant motherfucking mouth_ —

            “ _Neku_.”

            It was over. His life was over. He had survived every plot twist and mind fuck and impossibility the Game had pushed upon him. But this? This was the end, from which he could garner no return. “Down in flames” was pretty damn accurate.

            Ironically, he found the pause button by complete accident while searching for the “delete today” button.

            “Neku …” Joshua was looking at him so—gravely. Was he … going to get shot for being a Swiftie? Out of all the justifiable reasons to off him for good—

            “ _What_ do you think you’re doing? I was listening to that.”

            … as fate would have it, Joshua had a choreographed gesture for every single word of every single line throughout the entirety of Blank Space. And he practiced no scarcity of sass in the hair flip he so cleverly assigned to, “ _they’ll tell you I’m insane_.” Neku had an inkling that it was most likely a jab at certain events surrounding the _perfectly incidental_ almost-destruction of a highly populated ward of Tokyo. Ultimately, it seemed that Neku’s final moments had somehow evolved into a spontaneous dance party, boasting such juvenile antics as lip-singing into mixing spoons and mock-serenading the absolute last person he would have predicted would willfully share in this flagrantly frivolous festivity.  

            Go figure.

            By some means, in the midst of their Swift-induced revelry, a little bit of baking was accomplished. There was minor squabbling as to what order, exactly, was rightly assigned to the colors of the rainbow. Neku relinquished all input when Joshua insisted that, metaphorically speaking, he was miles closer to a rainbow than Neku could ever in his life hope to be. It was fruitless to argue when … well, he wasn’t _wrong_.

            Once their flamboyant sugar rush was tucked ceremoniously into the oven, there seemed no better choice but to collapse onto the remarkably uncomfortable floor and wait out the next forty-five minutes, recovering from the physical exertion of being up and rising pop icons. Unsurprisingly, Joshua was the first to fish into his pockets for his obnoxiously florescent cellphone. In the moments that Neku spent watching him critically, analyzing the ways he could possibly “cheat code” reality at this point, he noticed a lump of violet batter streaked into the back of his hair floof.

            “… You’re not Noise-baking it on the sly, are you?” he ventured, mostly out of the boredom involved with … watching a cake not do anything whatsoever.

            “If you think you can patent Noise as a means of contained heat radiation, please do put together a demonstration for us,” was the predictably mordant reply. Keyboard tones were flowing steadily from beneath his thumbs as he languidly tapped out some message of high importance. It could almost be wagered that he found cake watching more enthralling than whatever matter was currently boring him senseless from across the city. “… I’m never _off_ duty, you know. Being Composer doesn’t serendipitously cease to be when basking in the light of your majestic company.”

            Of course not. But, looking down at the frayed buckles of his shoes, he couldn’t deny that he forgot that fact more often than he remembered it. Somehow, in some inconceivable way, Joshua’s strangeness was just … another indisputable truth of the world. Notebook paper was lined. A right angle was ninety degrees. The colors of the rainbow go from red to violet (apparently). And Joshua was … who he was. Every hue and shade, every twist and turn in whatever refracting prism he anchored under his skin. What kind of person that entailed was reflecting into sharper clarity every day that they put aside their roles, their assumptions, their weaponized barriers and trivialized fronts. In virtually any context, however, he could not imagine being within sight of a full picture. When it came down to it … what did he know about the Composer, anyway?

            “By the way, there is a cooking utensil on the ceiling.”

            Neku followed the tilt of the other’s chin, lighting upon the mentioned eye sore before processing the words passed to him in disinterest. Sure enough, a splatter of blue, a gooey, rapidly thickening and cementing glob of glucose, plastered itself above them, and in its vice a wooden spoon was hopelessly pinned against gravity.

            “It slipped away from me at some point between the first and second verse,” Joshua elaborated to Neku’s shock-slackened jaw.

            “Aren’t you supposed to be—clairvoyant or whatever? You just _let_ that happen?”

            “Neku, you said no tricks. Old fashioned. Remember?”

            The toneless giggle following this friendly reminder grated on Neku’s nerves like no other. He might as well be exchanging pleasantries with a nail and a chalkboard at this point.

            “I would have yanked it down myself, but … it’s _over my head_ , isn’t it, heehee. Under normal stipulations, giving myself a height boost would be a quick enough remedy. But considering the extenuating circumstances …”

            Joshua had never heard of a ladder, evidently.

“Well, anyway, you’re the expert at getting things done nice and normal-like, so I thought it most appropriate to leave the job to you.”

            Before Neku could initiate a tirade of verbally abusive expletives, Joshua had begun shuffling to his feet, straightening out his wrinkled attire in the most pretentious show of futility ever witnessed by mortal eye sockets. For some inexplicable reason, Neku found himself politely waiting for his returned attention; another cellular message was manifesting itself in his hand, ostensibly as tedious as the first. The pause in their exchange carried a vibe vaguely like a press conference that halted momentarily while the president of some multinational corporation was relayed a whispered message of urgency.

            “Mmm. _Well_ , Neku—“

             Was it … weird that he knew exactly what was coming next?

             “Death itself came calling, and they want their Composer back.”

             Surprise, surprise.

            “It’s past your bedtime at the nursing home. I get it.”

            Expressing a rare degree of consideration, Joshua briefly contemplated the fate of the now quite fragrant baked good which would be missing out on a home in the belly of the reanimated dead. “My, that’s problematic. It’s bigger than your thoracic circumference, after all. You should let Shiki in on the goods.”

            As—dubiously as he had chosen to phrase that idea …

            “Yeah. I’ll dig the eggshells out of it first,” Neku agreed, not without aiming a significant smirk at the Composer’s brittle, brittle ego. Like he had _missed_ Butterfinger Kiryu’s ineffective endeavors to extricate an off-white shell from an equally off-white vat of cake batter.

            “Thoughtful of you.”

            And then he was gone, the soft clicking of the door’s catch solidifying the sudden solidarity sinking in heavier and heavier bouts of silence. It occurred to the boy still leaning his back against the bottom-most board of a kitchen counter that the Composer wasn’t very into formal goodbyes. It also occurred to him, upon leaning back his head, that the Composer’s incessant need to show off knew no bounds, even at the cost of a victory in an unofficial bet. Studying the seamless, spotless, stainless span of ceiling that had once been grossly defaced, it was obvious that _no_ , Joshua could not function for very long without incorporating his loftier capabilities.

             Although … they were _his_ advantages to use. And by extension, they were part of Joshua himself, as embedded in his identity as were the infuriating, self-satisfied grins. That much was undeniable, despite the fractalic levels of moral ambiguity involved.

            The timer on the oven counted down to 00:00 and screamed in the absence of motion, in the stillness that flooded and pushed the sheetrock of the dimmed walls.

            An esteemed few were aware of this. But maintaining a friendship with Shibuya’s Composer was nothing comparable to a slice of pie.

            It was more like a piece of cake.


End file.
